저는 한국어를 공부해요

Translation: I study Korean.

Call it burning out, call it slacking, call it what you will, but I haven’t been pushing writing in Korean nearly as hard as I was, or as hard as I should’ve been. I mentioned Lang-8.com way back when; when I had first initially started using it. It sounded so great, post in your desired language, and have native speakers correct your mistakes for you.

Unfortunately I quickly burnt out because I was attmpting to write sentences far beyond the reach of my grammatical skills. So I took some time off to lick my wounds. (It’s extremely difficult to go from writing in whatever tense and/or form you want to in one language to being stuck firmly in the Present Tense in another.)

Last Thursday, however, while riding the bus to Seoul reviewing last week’s unit, I was hit by a sudden blast of inspiration: basic, uncomplicated sentences. I wrote them down as best I could, vowing to attempt to make headway into Lang-8 once I was back in Jeonju.

Fast forward a week, and the day has arrived. Now, first some background. Last week in class I didn’t learn much. My new(est) teacher was absent again (I’m guessing summer break), and I was reunited with my original teacher; which was great. Unfortunately not having worked with each other in about a month’s time meant a lot of time was spent getting reaquainted. Worse still, no homework was given as the group is taking a campning fieldtrip this weekend. So I was spinning my wheels all week.

And the memory of Lang-8 lingered in the back of my mind. So finally, last night, I sat down and posted my Seoul trip’s sentences. And they came back rather successful!

As you can see above, while I was making mistakes, they weren’t huge mistakes. They were more akin to struggling to find your footing type of struggle when you’re first learning how to walk. Such as I typed 잘 instead of 잔 for glass. Not insurmountable mistakes, and reassurance that I’m on the right track.

I’ve learned the things I need to focus on are object and location markers (I didn’t use any in the sentences), as well as going over the differences between 제 (My) and 나 (I).